By Lance Ulanoff From Mashable

One of the discussions I’ve been having ever since CENTCOM’s Twitter and YouTube accounts were hacked by ISIS supporters is whether or not agencies like U.S. Central Command should even be on social media.

The short answer is, obviously, yes. At least it’s obvious to me.

Like any innovation, social media is not without risks. Depending on what you use, it’s a public or semi-public platform. Whatever you post will be seen by more people than you intended — this is a given. So you always post as if the world is your audience.

These are easy and evident truths.

What isn’t so obvious is if being on social media offers real benefit to organizations and companies. Recently, I went on CNBC to talk about this subject and the host asked me what were the actual benefits of social media. I was so surprised by the question that, initially, I asked him if he wanted to know about the risks or benefits. For the sake of argument, let’s start with the former.

THE RISKS
Bad actors

An employee could carelessly or purposely post something horrible on social media. This has definitely happened. In 2014, a US Airways employee accidentally posted a very NSFW image on the main US Airways Twitter account. In this case, the employee didn’t seem to understand how responding to the original tweet (to the US Airways account) would handle the offending image.

Sometimes employees intentionally hijack social media accounts. When HMV decided to cut staff, disgruntled employees took to the company’s main Twitter account to publicly vent their frustration.

Hack

Social media accounts are hacked every day. Sometimes it’s a celebrity account. Back in the early days of Twitter, a host of big name Twitter accounts (Britney Spears, President Barack Obama, Fox News) were all hacked.

Other times, it’s more niche accounts such as CENTCOM.

Poor judgment

You don’t even need a hack or mistake to suffer on social media. Even well-intentioned tweets from brands and people can sometimes go awry. When Best Buy tried to join the Serial podcast craze with what the consumer electronics retailer thought was a clever tweet, it got slammed for insensitivity. Of course, since the entire Serial Season One tale dealt with a brutal and premeditated murder, perhaps this should have been obvious.

THE BENEFITS
You control the message

Let’s say you’re a brand or organization (for profit or not) and you don’t have a Twitter, Vine, Instagram or YouTube account. That’s fine, as long as you’re comfortable with someone else creating an account in your name and shaping the message for you.

Parody accounts exist whether or not you bother to create and manage social media accounts. They can be helpful (DepressedDarth makes light of the iconic Star Wars brand and characters, but also does no discernible harm), purposeful (the CIA actually created a parody ISIS Twitter account to undermine the terrorist organization) or just plain damaging (see the fake BP Public Relations Twitter account that popped up during the 2010 BP oil spill disaster).

Outreach

Brands can track social media for virtually all comments mentioning their companies and products. They can choose to respond. It won’t always go smoothly, but most consumers appreciate the customer service.

Even though only a fraction of the world’s population is on social media —Twitter has 284 million monthly active users and Facebook has roughly 1.35 billion monthly active users— there are few better ways to deliver unfiltered information to the world than through your own social media accounts.

Twitter is also full of journalists. You’ll be glad you have a social media account when your brand or organization has to deliver important news fast. In 2010, the British Monarchy memorably shared news of the Prince of Wales Engagement to Catherine Middleton.

You can share your voice

When the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the Defense of Marriage Act in 2013, numerous brands took to Facebook, Instagram and Twitter to show their support, a fairly bold move when you consider that not everyone in the country was on board with the ruling. Still, brands often appear to be more willing to be bold on social media. In fact, social media can represent the cutting edge of social discourse. Within a year or so of that ruling and those posts, many companies are now running commercials on national television that feature same-sex couples.

THE REAL VILLAIN

As I was working on this post, I spent a bunch of time going back through stories about social media disasters. They’re all messy, embarrassing and probably would have been easy to avoid. However, I also noticed that none of the companies mentioned went out of business. Sure, employees were sometimes dismissed (that US Airways employee kept his job), but those hampered by breaches or mistaken or ill-conceived Tweets and Facebook posts appear to avoid repeating those missteps (though not always).

CENTCOM’s biggest mistake was not using the security tools, including those on Twitter, available to it. It’s like driving a fast car without a seatbelt. Someday you’re going to fly through that windshield.

Twitter offers a number of good security tips on its own site that include using a strong password (try 10 characters with upper and lower case — a sentence is good) and two-step authentication, which means you have to also have a special pin, delivered to the phone you’re holding, to log in. Avoiding phishing attacks is another.

For social media teams managing multiple accounts, use something like LastPass or OnePass. These tools let admins centrally manage and update passwords. As a result, a phishing attempt on one team member will never reveal the shared Twitter account password, because no one but the admin can actually view it.

It’s a fair bet that CENTCOM has a single social media manager or a few with a single-shared set of login credentials and they were the victim of a phishing attack. Someone on the team received an official-looking email, followed a bogus link and soon had accidentally shared either the social media log-in info or something else that made it easy for the hackers to figure out those credentials.

Human beings are often the weakest link in online security Human beings are often the weakest link in online security. A lack of education in these matters is a far greater evil than anything that can happen to you on social media.

To suggest that government agencies, organizations and brands get off social media because the risks are too great is akin to saying we shouldn’t drive cars because we can crash. Of course we can.

Technology can be dangerous. Innovation is risky. But we never stop driving, flying or posting. We simply manage the risks and reap the benefits every single day.

IMAGE: Social-media-dangerous-for-business-thumb IMAGE: MASHABLE, LUKE LEONARD
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